1. FIELD OF THE INVENTION
This invention relates to apparatus for receiving bulk volumes of chitterlings and dispensing them in quantity volume bases, into individual containers.
2. BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION
Chitterlings, the small intestines of hogs, is a nutritious, low-cost food that is popular in certain regions of the country, and among certain social and ethnic groups at least partially because of its low cost. However, one of the factors that tends to raise the market cost of chitterlings is the difficulty of handling and packaging them. This difficulty arises in part because of the structural nature of the intestines, that is, long, soft, intertwined strings of material which are not susceptible to ready separation.
In the past, the task of separating a desired small weight or volume of chitterlings from a larger mass, which often represents a bulk group of a large number of intestines, as accumulated in a slaughterhouse, was performed on a manual basis, using a knife to cut away the desired portion. This manual technique is well suited to butcher shops where customers purchase varying quantities of chitterlings, but is cumbersome, and expensive in labor terms when used in a packing house to fill large numbers of small containers with uniform portions of chitterlings. A worker must cut off a section of approximately the correct volume from the mass and must typically augment this initial portion with smaller portions to achieve the correct weight or volume. The difficulty of manually cutting the chitterlings adds an appreciable labor cost to a high volume, low margin, packing operation.
In the manual packing operation, the workers treat the chitterlings as discrete entities, in much the same way as they would when packaging groups of sausages or packing containers full of small fruits. However, the chitterlings have many of the attributes of a homogeneous mass, like grains or fluids and it are these very attributes that raise the cost of manually packaging chitterlings.